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StumbleUpon.com

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Anybody getting good traffic from StumbleUpon.com? That site first started getting my attention a few months ago while examining my logs. I didn't think that it would be a serious source of traffic but the referrals have gone up and now I am averaging over two hundred visitors per day.

This is another "social site" where regular visitors - referred to as "stumblers" - install a toolbar on their browser. They then sign up to "stumble" into websites that are in one or more of many themes featured by the site. You can sign up to see sites within (these are just a few of many categories).... activism, animals, arts, animation, astronomy, bizarre, cartoons, cats, crafts, cooking, drawing, graphic-design, humor, homemaking, illusions, indie-rock, internet, logic, linguistics, mac-os, music, multimedia, mathematics, online-games, painting, philosophy, photography, programming, psychology, religion, satire, science, sculpting or web-design.

Once you have the toolbar and have picked some themes you then click the "SU" logo on your toolbar and it transports you to a site within one of your selected themes. I signed up and have been stumbling into websites about digital physics, robotics, nanotech and more. Now, before you think that "EGOL has too much time on his hands...." I'll tell you that overall the quality of sites that I have been seeing is very high. Each time you "stumble" into a site you have an opportunity to give it the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and I am betting that sites that get the thumbs down a few times are dropped from the stumble list pretty quick. So the value to me is getting a look at some successful sites and I've found a few to blog about and have even asked for and gotten unreciprocated links from a some of them.

In addition to "stumbling" they also have SERPs (which remid me of Yahoo). In these SERPs, the pages that are getting lots of "thumbs up" votes are designated with from one to five yellow stars. I have lots of pages there with one or two stars and they don't yield much traffic but I also have a couple pages that waiver back and forth between four and five stars and these pages yielding about 100 referrals from SU per day which is why I like this site (-:

It is very clear that info sites and entertaining sites have an enormous advantage in this type of contest. I'm also thinking that an attractive design will give you a jump also.

OK... so, go over there and sign up and give one of your best pages the "thumbs up" and see if it leads to anything. And here's a tip. Pick a user name that is an easier keyword that you don't have coverage for on your sites. Your user page will start showing in the google SERPs and might even pull a little traffic on its own.

So, check your logs and see if any stumblers are coming to your site. Then go try it out and come back here and let us know what you think... and if you give the "thumbs up" to one of your sites that is yet unrated there, come back a week later and tell us if has yielded any traffic.

About EGOL —
Great content will defeat SEO over time. Focus all of your attention on building equity.

Randfish,
The number of visits I get is not based on anything that I have done to encourage it directly. In fact, I very rarely use SU myself. I believe the cause of it is simply that I have a good quality site (iblist.com) that tends to attract anyone that is looking for a site in that category. I've always followed a very simple philosophy, content is king. The site is not well optimized from the SEO standpoint, but it does attract people to it.

Hi Egol,
Good catch! I like it. It appears you folks have a friend in Germany who likes your beginners guide. Would you classify this site as a "Directory" or are there enough "Social Sites" to warrant their own classification? How long do you think it will be, before people start Spamming the site until it's unusable?

The only problem I’ve found with SU traffic is that it is very ephemeral. Bounce rates are enormously high and time spent on the site is fleeting. A 1% conversion rate for RSS would be enormous for StumbleUpon traffic

sluz - the problem with spam on stumbleupon is that as soon as enough people click "thumbs down," the site isn't going to get much more traffic. THe spam community would have to outnumber the real world community to make a difference and that's hard to automate when it's built into a browser in the toolbar.
There also has to be an incentive to spam and since "stumblers" aren't going to be linking to or buying from sites that get spammed into SU, it's hard to imagine what that incentive would be.

Ok, I've now spent an enormous amount of time stumbling. I admit it's been fun, and I have no doubt I will continue to stumble rather than working day after day after day. However, I finally cleared my head for a moment to remember why I started doing this in the first place. Oh yeah, cuz you said I could stumble my own site. Ok, so now I'm lost. How? I can find no place to add my site so that I can give it a lovely thumbs up. Help! My cleared head will quickly go fuzzy again as I start stumbling again. I may not remember the reason I'm doing it for much longerrrrrr.....
10 seconds later...figured it out all by myself. :) So, for anyone else who is fuzzy-headed, here are the incredibly complex instructions.
1. Go to your site, using the standard means of doing so (typing the url in the address bar, or choosing from your bookmars).
2. Click the thumbs up button.
3. A little popup window will encourage you to tag the site.
4. Pat yourself on the back and continue stumbling.

I've been stumbling for almost a year now. Wait until you've seen the page that says stumble cannot find any more pages for you, that's when you know you've been on way too long.
I gave you a thumbs up, don't know why I didn't before.